Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands Page 3

  A senior now, Herbert was anxious to be out on his own. Graduation was fast approaching. The teachers had chosen him to speak at commencement, and this honor brought out his insecurity. “But I can do my best.”26 As always, doing his “best” meant working hard on the task at hand. Commencement evidently came and went without great trauma caused by a botched valedictory. At least Herbert never mentioned it in his letters to Fred.

  Now the road was open to the future. Nearly nineteen, Herbert had accomplished as much as he could have in the little community bounded by the farm, Tomah, and Tunnel City. Optimistic, attractive, and outgoing, Herbert faced the future certain of only one thing: a lot of hard work. Even so, success was not assured. The track for advancement he had chosen, higher education, was virtually unknown to him. From Tomah he could see only a few paces ahead as his brother proceeded. Yet he was determined to make something of himself through ambition and hard work.

  Herbert did not know it, but a place was already being prepared for him. In 1884 forty-one historians had gathered at a resort in Saratoga, New York, to found the AHA. Their purpose was straightforward: the promotion of historical studies “without limitations of time or space,” as Harvard professor Justin Winsor explained.27 “The future of this new work is in the young men of the historical instinct,” he continued, “largely in the rising instructors of our colleges.” Founded for the promotion of history, the AHA would become primarily an organization of, by, and for college professors of history. They would form a new professional class: college professors with a doctorate. The AHA founders took the German academy and its faculties as their model. The new American doctor-professors would transform their universities into Germanic research institutions whose mission was to investigate history rather than to merely reiterate well-worn moral tales about the past. The transformation involved the establishment of doctoral programs so that as time marched on new generations of American-trained PhDs would fill the ranks of the professorate in the United States. It followed that institutions with doctoral programs would attain the highest level of prestige among colleges and universities.28 Thus research universities, graduate schools, and doctoral production formed a self-perpetuating and self-justifying regime. None of this was laid out in the AHA constitution, but it nevertheless came to pass.

  The first AHA members’ historical interests embraced the American West. In 1885 the AHA passed a resolution that called for the careful recording of the history of the western states and territories.29 A second resolution called for cataloging historical documents concerning the United States held in European archives. A third resolution commended the German historian Leopold von Ranke, “the oldest and most distinguished exponent” of “historical science.”30 These resolutions were not unrelated. The AHA founders envisioned their historical enterprise as an excruciatingly detailed Rankean effort that would be global in extent. Before there could be a proper history of the United States, specialists must assemble the documents, whether they were in Leadville or London. The teenaged Herbert had no way of knowing about these resolutions, but they defined his life's work.

  In the summer of 1889 the arcane discussions of historians did not concern Herbert. He was looking for a job. Like his brother, he hoped to teach school, but it was not an easy matter for an inexperienced high school graduate to convince school boards that he was up to the task. He searched for a position with characteristic energy and thoroughness. In a flurry of writing he sent letters to fourteen schools. Whenever possible, Herbert spoke with board members and clerks. Surely, he explained to Fred, after all of this activity he “must get something of a place.”31 Fred was especially interested in his brother's employment prospects because a portion of Herbert's meager salary would go to support Fred's education. Once Fred's schooling was complete, he would help finance Herbert's college years. The striving brothers would alternate years of school teaching with stints as college students. This was the scholars’ hard road of upward mobility that would culminate in university professorships for the Boltons.

  But first Herbert had to get a job, and school boards were remarkably unimpressed with the nineteen-year-old inexperienced (but earnest) applicant. In the summer Fred worked for a lumber company in Granite, Wisconsin, so Herbert followed him there. When Fred departed for Milwaukee in late summer, Herbert took his job as store manager. This brought him into contact with a rough, migratory laboring class of lumberjacks and shingle weavers. It must have been difficult for a boy so young to look such men in the eye and tell them what they owed the company store.

  Fred and Herbert may have been college men, or at least college bound, but they were not pansies. They wrestled with the lumberjacks on their days off and gave a good account of themselves. Herbert made friends with some of the more colorful characters who worked in the woods. He recounted some of their misadventures—and their debts to the store—in his letters to Fred.32 These encounters must have reminded the Boltons that they were not too far removed from the laborers’ life that they were trying to escape for good.

  In September Herbert finally heard that the small town of York had decided to take a chance on him. He settled business in Granite and departed for his new job with a sense of purpose and affection for “the renowned (new) York,” the “home of my heart and the center of all rural attractions.”33 The school suited him. Most of his scholars were almost as old as he was. Some young men already had moustaches. The school was ungraded, which meant that he taught students of all ages in the same room. He was grateful that all but two of his charges were able to read and write.34

  Teaching in York was good experience for Herbert, but he led a solitary life while preparing for Normal. As usual he asked Fred for advice about books to read. The uncertainty of regular pay at York troubled him too, because he had a hard time forwarding money to Fred. His affection for the small town quickly wore thin. “I should like to get into a town somewhere in civilization. It is so lonesome here. No one to talk with on a subject that interests me, or any-one wishing to pursue any line of book study.”35 The boy from a two-horse town looked down on the one-horse town that claimed his services. He quit at the end of the first semester.

  Herbert's loneliness was real enough. He and Gertrude occasionally exchanged letters and saw each other when he went home, but he may have taken her for granted.36 “I'll be terribly sweet when I go home…and make up for it all. Someday I'll get left, won't I?” he cavalierly added. He had also heard a false rumor that Gertrude and several other Tunnel City students would not graduate on time. The story might have lowered Gertrude a bit in the estimation of a young man who was betting everything on the power of education to improve his condition in the world. Gertrude's intelligence and excellent academic performance had been among the qualities that recommended her to Herbert. Now, perhaps, she was lowering her sights, looking ahead to a life as wife and mother with some local farm boy or merchant. Besides, Herbert had a long way to go before he was ready for marriage and capable of supporting a family. Gertrude, “old girl,” as he sometimes called her, might turn out to be Herbert's old girl. In the fullness of his young manhood he no doubt assumed that the choice would be his, but life would be full of surprises for Herbert.

  Once home, Herbert hoped to work and save enough to join Fred at Wisconsin Normal in the fall. He had managed to save a hundred dollars from his York earnings, but he put this in the family common fund and so was not able to use that money to go to Milwaukee or to help Fred. But he was not the only Bolton who was banking on higher education to lift the family out of penury. Mrs. Bolton had mortgaged the farm to help the boys through college. Then she sold a horse for $85 and sent some money to Fred. To Herbert's great surprise and satisfaction, the family urged him to go to normal school immediately and provided money to do it. On March 1 he informed Fred that he would arrive in Milwaukee the next Monday on the midnight train.37

  The budding scholar who had looked down on little York was now in Milwaukee, which was probably the first
sizable city he had ever seen. With its bustling Lake Michigan port, burgeoning industry, and growing immigrant population Milwaukee must have been exciting and overwhelming at first.38 Wisconsin Normal was located near the heart of the city. Normal schools were meant to train professional teachers with a two-year college curriculum designed with pedagogy in mind.39 Professionalization was one of the watchwords of the late nineteenth century. Self-taught physicians and lawyers gave way to university-trained men (and a few women) who increasingly dominated their professional worlds. The time would soon pass away when a likely high school graduate, perhaps one who was big enough to “handle” the larger pupils, could find a job at a country school as the Bolton boys had done. Indeed, Fred and Herbert would eventually help hasten the day when college training was a prerequisite for school teaching at all levels. The brothers saw no irony in this development.

  Herbert and Fred roomed together in the spring. With his brother's help Herbert adapted and prospered, in the personal sense if not financially. Still, scholastic success in this new and strange atmosphere was not guaranteed, and Herbert did not immediately impress Wisconsin Normal students as a comer. One of his friends later recalled that he was not sure if the green boy from Tomah would make it through Normal.40 He was well established at the school by the fall of 1890, when his brother, diploma in hand, departed for Fairchild to be principal of the high school there.41 Fred's new job was convincing evidence of the value of higher education. At age twenty-four, with less than two years’ teaching experience, Fred's normal school certificate made him a high school principal. Here was tangible proof that the Boltons’ faith in higher education was well placed. Fairchild was only a way station for Fred. He was headed to the state university in Madison eventually but needed to make money to finance Herbert as well as gain experience in the field. Fred was turning to education as his academic specialty. As a teacher of teachers he might land a job at one of the new normal schools that were being established in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

  Wisconsin Normal offered college-level courses, but was by no means a comprehensive university. As its graduates were expected to teach many subjects, the curriculum was general. The normal school diploma was not a bachelor's degree, but a certification of the holder's competence to teach school in specific disciplines. Mastery of a textbook in the field seemed to be the common standard for each course. Herbert studied mathematics, grammar, political economy, history, rhetoric, science, Latin, modern languages, pedagogy, and practice teaching all crammed into a year and a half of intense study.42

  Social life in Milwaukee was far more interesting than anything Herbert had experienced before. After Fred's departure Herbert roomed with other Normal students. Despite his sometimes cloistered study habits Herbert easily made friends among the students, men and women alike. Gertrude apparently slipped off of his list of preferred female companions. There was no lack of attractive young ladies to escort to dances, sleigh rides, and other entertainments at Wisconsin Normal. Besides, Gertrude was younger and still in Tunnel City.

  Gertrude, perhaps sensing that Herbert was losing interest, then stunned him by announcing that she intended to teach. “She always swore against it,” he wrote his brother. “But so we do change. I think she will be a success with smaller children,” he added, not quite willing to grant Gertrude full credit for a career move that was identical to his own.43 Gertrude landed a job in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota.44 This was a bold move, revealing an unexpected streak of independence and drive in the small-town girl Herbert thought he knew. And she did not have to go to York to teach bumpkins, he no doubt noticed. His correspondence with Gertrude had dwindled (at least he seldom mentioned it to Fred), and he no longer regarded their relationship as a courtship, if he ever had. But Gertrude, well, Gertrude had other plans.

  All the while, Herbert portrayed himself as a carefree youth playing the field. “Now I'm not in love—with anybody, but my Dutch and my Norwegian girls used to bother me somewhat, for I did not know which to please. I settled it by trying to please them both. Hope I succeeded.”45 One school incident hints that he was not quite the sophisticated lover that his letters made him out to be. Miss Faddis, an instructor at Normal, held regular classes in manners. Herbert attended infrequently, but decided to put in an appearance one day. He was the only man among fifteen young women for whom Miss Faddis was demonstrating the correct method of shaking hands, a procedure evidently more complicated in 1891 than it is today. Perhaps she failed to notice the lone gentleman in the room, or maybe she just forgot herself in the midst of a teachable moment. Whatever the case, in order to make clear the particularities of correct posture, she raised her dress “nearly up to her ___ ,” Herbert reported to Fred. This display of feminine pulchritude was too much for the blushing young brother, who left the room. He immediately reported the incident to Professor Mapel, but did not get the response that he expected. “ ‘Oh my dear boy!’ said he. ‘you don't like it because you are not interested. If Mr Gillan should give you the work you would do your best.’ ” Herbert evidently did not quite follow the gist of Mapel's remark. “I soon made him understand that he had told the truth for Gillan is a teacher, and Miss F. is not.”46 The boy from Tomah was not yet up to the droll humor of the urban sophisticates in Milwaukee.

  The end of the spring semester 1891 found Herbert preparing for graduation and looking for employment. Fred was going to the University of Wisconsin in the fall, so Herbert needed a good job in order to support his brother's further education. The brothers put an amazing amount of time and energy into their search for employment. They seemed to know of openings in every school throughout the state and shared information about each place, who they knew there, and who could help them with a recommendation. Herbert's best chance for employment came from his brother's recommendation to replace him at Fairchild. He considered a position in Montello, but Professor Gillan thought it would go to a Catholic, so he advised Herbert to concentrate on Fairchild.47 Religious and ethnic prejudice worked both ways in the 1890s, as the Protestant Herbert learned.

  With neither summer nor fall plans firmed up, Herbert looked forward to graduation. If not quite a lettered man, he at least would have a diploma that certified his professional standing among the ranks of Wisconsin teachers. He was relieved to pass this milestone in his diligent program of self-improvement and upward mobility.48

  In July Fairchild finally decided to hire Herbert as principal at seventy dollars per month. At about the same time he learned about Fairchild, something else popped up. Gertrude, fresh from a year of teaching at St. Paul, wanted to study with him during the summer. He thought it would be a good idea, but the plan did not materialize as Gertrude had hoped.49 Herbert took a job as a traveling salesman of memberships in an association that sold books to members at discount prices. “Now if a man has time and wants a trip to California he can get there all right if he will work.”50 He liked the money, but selling on the road was not the path to status that he had in mind. A traveler did “not belong to any society, and of course” was “a fraud.”51 Herbert would find another way to get to California.

  A letter from Gertrude found Herbert while he was on the road. She had heard about a teaching position at Fairchild and asked Herbert to help her get it. He was willing, but it turned out that the position had already been filled. Too bad, but Gertrude, a young woman of remarkable resilience, persistence, and determination, was not finished with Herbert yet.52

  At summer's end Herbert went to Fairchild to take up his post as high school principal. He was twenty-one and only two years out of high school, yet now he taught pupils who were nearly as old as himself, managed the school, and oversaw teachers who were far older and more experienced than he was.53 Of course, he taught his own classes, so preparation was part of his day. As always, he worked at night for as long as the light and his energy held out. In addition to his myriad duties Herbert prepared himself to enter the University of Wisconsin, where Fred was now a student. Herbert
would maintain this demanding schedule for two years, sending Fred whatever money he could spare.

  It should come as no surprise that Herbert managed to do all of this work. By then discipline and labor were ingrained in him, but there was more to the principal's job than work. The management of older teachers who must have resented a mere youth as their new chief required sound judgment. Before long one of the teachers began to give him trouble, but he stood firm and eventually forced her to resign.54 “The one who wears the slipper can kick hardest and hurt most,” he observed.55 Despite his youth Herbert was willing to take charge, give orders, and insist that they be carried out. He did not like subordinates who challenged him. In his world, even in little Fairchild, status and authority went hand in glove. For the most part Herbert wore authority lightly, but he wielded it without compunction.

  Principals had to deal with superiors as well as subordinates. The state school superintendent, Oliver E. Wells, had to approve the work done at Wisconsin high schools. He also had something to say about who taught summer institutes and was an ex officio member of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents. Wells's win was something of a surprise in the 1890 election that swept him and other Democrats into office.56 Needless to say, getting along with Superintendent Wells was crucial for high school principals. Wells, however, was not well liked by the Bolton brothers. He hoped to revamp the University of Wisconsin to emphasize practical subjects that would better serve the people of Wisconsin, or so he believed. Fred wrote a critical newspaper article about Wells. “Good for you!” wrote brother Herbert. “I endorse your sentiment…exactly.”57